The amount of time spent refueling transportation vehicles has a large impact on the cost of transportation, both for vehicle owners and service station owners and operators. Refueling time may vary greatly depending on a variety of factors including required processing time for a fuel sale and/or transaction. Typically, a driver of a transportation vehicle must enter a refueling station, park the vehicle, exit the vehicle, enter authorization and/or payment information for the transaction at a point-of-sale system and wait for approval before starting to refuel.
Vehicle-based radio frequency identification (RFID) tag systems may be deployed to increase the efficiency and throughput of a fueling station. In such systems, tag readers are positioned at each fueling pump of a service station and read vehicle information from tags on or in vehicles that approach the pump for refueling. However, the pumps and service stations at which the tag readers are deployed must be designed with care to ensure that an RFID tag associated with a first vehicle is not inadvertently read during the fueling operation of a second vehicle, resulting in an erroneous assignment of the second vehicle's fuel cost to the first vehicle's tag. Additionally, deployment of RFID tag readers at each fueling pump within a fueling station is expensive, especially if retrofitted or installed after the construction of the fueling pumps and/or the fueling station.
Additionally, consumers remain very price-conscious when it comes to the purchasing of fuel. Recognizing this price-consciousness, many fueling station operators have entered into loyalty agreements with other goods and services providers, such as supermarkets, convenience stores, discount stores, and other retailers. A common implementation is to offer consumers “points” for completing purchases and other transactions within a loyalty agreement network. These “points” may be exchanged at a fueling station for a discount on fuel (usually offered as a percentage or per-unit price reduction). For various reasons, such loyalty programs are usually managed and operated by a retailer other than the fueling station or its operator. For example, a supermarket chain may offer “points” only to consumers that exclusively use the supermarket chain's discount card, and the supermarket chain may only assign “points” to the supermarket chain's card. Another implementation increasing in use is one of “integration,” wherein a supermarket or membership-based discount chain may own and/or operate a service station, usually located in the parking lot of the retailer's store. Cost savings are realized by capable management of the distribution and logistical costs of the service station and integrating such costs into the costs of the retailer's primary line of business within the store. Recognizing the price-consciousness of their consumers, these owners and/or operators may desire to “pass on” cost savings achieved through such “integration,” but would prefer to do so only to customers who frequently shop at the associated retail store (e.g., are signed up for the retail store's discount program and/or are paying members in the membership-based discount chain).
The discount cards used to deploy these programs are typically unassociated with a payment method, given their simple design and the ease with which they can be misplaced. Therefore, in order to redeem “points,” or otherwise authenticate that a user is a member of a membership program and/or loyalty-program, the consumer must present two pieces of information to the fueling station: a loyalty card or membership card, which may contain their redeemable “points,” as well as a payment method to actually purchase the desired fuel. This increases the average length of time to complete a loyalty or membership-based transaction, thereby decreasing efficiency.